Landsman stands by the couch, watching the old man’s chest rise and fall. Hertz’s face has the hollows and facets of a flaked arrowhead.
“He’s a bad man,” Landsman says. “And he always was.”
“I helped him fix himself up,” Hertz says finally. “I waited till he was under. Way, deep down under. Then I took out Gaystik’s gun. I wrapped it in the pillow. Gaystik’s .38 Detective Special. Rolled the boy over onto his belly. Back of the head. It was quick. There was no pain.”
He licks his lips again, and Berko is there with another cool swallow.
“Too bad you couldn’t do as good a job on yourself,” Berko says.
“I thought I was doing the right thing, that it would put a stop to Litvak.” The old man sounds plaintive, childish. “But then the bastards went ahead and decided to try it without him.”
Ester-Malke takes the lid from a glass jar of mixed nuts on the table beside the couch and stuffs a handful into her mouth. “Don’t think I’m not totally disturbed and horrified by all of this, friends,” she says, hoisting herself to her feet. “But I’m a tired lady in her first trimester, and I’m going to bed.”
“I want to sit with him, sweetness,” Berko says. He adds, “In case he’s faking and he tries to steal the television once we’re asleep.”
“Don’t worry,” Bina says. “He’s already under arrest.”
“Yes, but he made up for it by being a terrible father.” Berko stares at Hertz for a long time with tenderness and contempt. The old man looks like some kind of demented swami in that bandage. “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing, what do you mean what am I going to do?”
“I don’t know, you have that twitchy thing happening. You look like you’re going to do something.”
“What?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
“I’m not going to do anything,” Landsman says. “What can I do?”
Ester-Malke walks Bina and Landsman down the hall to the front door of the apartment. Landsman puts on his porkpie hat.
“So,” Ester-Malke says.
“So,” say Bina and Landsman.
“I note that the two of you are leaving together.”
“You want us to leave separately?” Landsman says. “I can take the stairs and Bina can ride down in the elevator.”
“Landsman, let me tell you something,” Ester-Malke says. “All these people rioting on the television in Syria, Baghdad, Egypt? In London? Burning cars. Setting fire to embassies. Up in Yakovy, did you see what happened, they were dancing, those fucking maniacs, they were so happy about all this craziness, the whole floor collapsed right onto the apartment underneath. A couple of little girls sleeping in their beds, they got crushed to death. That’s the kind of shit we have to look forward to now. Burning cars and homicidal dancing. I have no idea where this baby is going to be born. My murdering, suicidal father-in-law is sleeping in my living room. Meanwhile, I’m getting this very strange vibration from the two of you. So let me just say that if you and Bina are planning to get back together, excuse me, but that’s all I need.”
Landsman considers this. Any kind of wonder seems likely. That the Jews will pick up and set sail for the promised land to feast on giant grapes and toss their beards in the desert wind. That the Temple will be rebuilt, speedily and in our day. War will cease, ease and plenty and righteousness will be universal, and humankind will be treated to the regular spectacle of lions and lambs cohabiting. Every man will be a rabbi, every woman a holy book, and every suit will come with two pairs of pants. Meyer’s seed, even now, may be wandering through darkness toward redemption, striking at the membrane that separates the legacy of the yids who made him from that of the yids whose errors, griefs, hopes, and calamities went into the production of Bina Gelbfish.
“Maybe it would be better if I took the stairs,” Landsman says.
“You go right ahead and do that, Meyer,” says Bina.
But then when he finally makes it all the way down, he finds her at the bottom, waiting for him.
“What took you so long?” she says.
“I had to stop a time or two on the way.”
“You need to quit smoking. Quit again.”
“I do. I will.” He fishes out his package of Broadways, fifteen left to burn, and arcs it into the lobby trash can like a dime carrying a wish into a fountain. He’s feeling a little giddy, a little tragic. He is ripe for the grand gesture, the operatic mistake. Manic is probably the word. “But that’s not what held me up.”
“You’re really hurt. Tell me you’re not really hurt, walking around so tough and macho when you need to be in the goddamn hospital.” She reaches for his wind pipe with the fingers of both hands, ready, as ever, to choke the life from Landsman to show how much she cares. “Are you hurt badly, you idiot?”
“Only in my soul, sweetness,” Meyer says. Though he supposes it’s possible that Rafi Zilberblat’s bullet creased more than his skull. “I just had to stop a couple of times. To think. Or not to think, I don’t know. Every time I let myself try to, you know, breathe, just for ten seconds, with the air full of this tiling we’re letting them get away with, I don’t know, I feel like I’m suffocating a little bit.”
Landsman sinks onto a sofa whose bruise-colored cushions give off a strong Sitka odor of mildew, cigarettes a complicated saltiness that is part stormy sea, part sweat on the lining of a wool fedora. The lobby of the Dnyeper is all blood-purple velvet and gilded crust, blown-up hand-tinted postcards of the great Black Sea resorts in Tsarist times. Ladies with their lapdogs on sun struck promenades. Grand hotels that never housed a Jew.
“It’s like a stone in my belly, this deal we made,” Landsman says. “Just lying there.”
Bina rolls her eyes, hands on her hips, glances at the door. Then she comes over and drops her bag and plops down beside him. How many times, he wonders, can she have enough of him, already, and still have not quite enough?
“I can’t really believe you agreed to it,” she says.
“I know.”
“I’m supposed to be the brownnose around here.”
“Tell me about it.”
“The ass licker.”
“It’s killing me.”
“If I can’t rely on you to tell the big shots to fuck off, Meyer, why do I keep you around?”
He tries to explain to her, then, the considerations that led him to make his own personal version of the deal. He names some of the small things — the canneries, the violinists, the marquee of the Baranof Theatre — that it pleased him to cherish about Sitka when he was coming to terms with Cashdollar.
“You and your goddamned Heart of Darkness,” Bina says. “I’m not sitting through that movie ever again.” She shrinks her mouth down to a hard mark. “You forgot something, asshole. On your sweet little list. You were one item short, I’d say.”
“Bina.”
“You have no place for me on that list of yours? Because I hope you know you’re at the fucking top of mine.”
“How is that possible?” Landsman says. “I just don’t see how that could be.”
“Why not?”
“Because, you know. I failed you. I let you down. I feel like I just let you down so badly.”
“In what way?”
“Because of what I made you do. To Diango. I don’t know how you can even stand to look at me.”
“Made me? You think you made me kill our baby?”
“No, Bina, I—”
“Let me tell you something, Meyer.” She grabs his hand, digging her nails into his skin. “The day you ever have that much control over my behavior, it will be because somebody’s asking you, should she get the pine box or a plain white shroud?” She discards his hand, then retrieves it and strokes at the fiery little moons she carved into his flesh. “Oh my God, your hand, I’m sorry. Meyer, I’m sorry.”